Newly manufactured products are tested to ensure they conform to operating specification requirements. Depending on the type of product, various testing techniques are used. For example, for hardware devices, such as printed circuit boards, test fixtures are created to provide an input stimulus and monitor outputs of the device for proper responses. If, for each of the input stimulus, the output is as anticipated, the printed circuit board passes the test.
To adequately test a particular integrated circuit, the integrated circuit must be tested against operating conditions in which the integrated circuit will be used. General-purpose, automated test equipment is generally used to test integrated circuits, such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, video graphic processors, etc. A simulated design verification suite, based on a hardware description language, of an integrated circuit being tested is used to create a virtual environment to test the integrated circuit. While the automated test equipment provides flexibility such that various integrated circuits may be tested, it is generally a costly piece of equipment (e.g., approximately $2 Million Dollars U.S.). In addition, the development of the customized test program is somewhat time consuming, which adds additional costs to the overall automated testing process.
As an alternative to using automated test equipment, test fixtures may be used that simulate the real environment in which the integrated circuit will be used. For example, for a microprocessor, the test fixture may include a motherboard within a personal computer. While this technique works well for specific integrated circuits, it becomes costly when attempting to test multiple integrated circuits at the same time. Separate test fixtures are needed to test each integrated circuit. For particular integrated circuits, such as graphics cards that interface to an accelerated graphics port (AGP) socket of a motherboard. Since the AGP sockets are designed to only support a single master AGP graphics card at one time, every graphics card being tested must use dedicated test fixture with a single AGP socket and motherboard. From the above discussion it should be apparent that an improved system for testing multiple integrated cards is needed.